Introduction Audio Transcript

It is a true honor and privilege for me to have occasion to work and practice with you on this program as we engage together in the cultivation of mindfulness, also as we face the challenges of life and the tenacious habits of the doing mode of mind and learn to gently release ourselves from its grasp moment by moment, as Mark and John and Zindel and I describe in the accompanying book.

The various tracks are all laboratories that allow us to refine and deepen our capacity to learn and grow and heal under fairly protected conditions. The brief 3 step breathing space practice that completes this program then becomes a vehicle for bringing what we have learned in the confines of these laboratories out into the larger world in ways that can be maximally effective. All of these guided meditations are meant to be fully engaged in rather than merely listened to.

In that vein, we suggest that you devote a specific time each day as the participants in our classes do, to practicing the various guided meditations according to the program outlined at the end of the book, at a time and a place where you can feel warm and protected and comfortable and free from interruptions.

That would include shutting off your various phones so that it becomes a time that is just for you, a time for opening to and learning to inhabit more the being mode of mind, letting go of the pull of the doing mode as best you can. By playing this program regularly and following along carefully with its instructions in the various meditations, using the stretches of silence, short as they are, to practice on your own. You are assuming an active and powerful role in deepening your own health and well-being.

The most important element of all these practices is your awareness, and that, as we will be discovering firsthand, is already a deep and powerful faculty of yours just by virtue of being human, no matter what you are feeling in any particular moment. What we are practicing here, above all, is simply refining this capacity of awareness and learning to trust it more and inhabit it with greater confidence and ease in the face of whatever arises, either inwardly or outwardly in our lives.

Ultimately, we may come to see that the real practice of mindfulness is nothing less than how we live our lives, and that it is life itself, and everything that happens along the way, that is the ultimate laboratory for the discovery of our capacity for living fully, while we have the chance. All 4 of us wish you all the best on this unfolding adventure of a lifetime.